1. Technical Field
The technical field relates to a three-dimensional system, and more particularly to a material level detecting mechanism having detection units for obtaining the dispensing amount of the modeling material.
2. Description of Related Art
With advancement in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), a three dimensional printing technology (3-D printing technology) has been developed in the manufacturing industry, thereby rapidly fabricating products from an original design concept. The 3-D printing, in fact, is a general term of a series of rapid prototyping (RP) techniques, and the basic principle thereof, and the concept thereof is a laminate manufacturing, wherein a rapid prototyping machine is used to form cross-sectional shapes of a workpiece in the X-Y plane through scanning, shift intermittently at a layer thickness in the Z coordinates, and ultimately form 3-D objects. The 3-D printing technology is unrestrictedly applicable for the geometric shapes and the RP technology produces excellent outputs in particular for complex parts, which saves efforts and processing time significantly. As a result, the digital 3-D printing technology is capable of presenting an object of a digital 3-D model designed by means of computer-aided design (CAD) software under a shortest time requirement for the user to touch and actually feel the geometry of the model, or even to do possible functional test thereof.
However, in the current 3-D printing apparatuses which uses refillable cartridges, the usage or remaining amount of the modeling material of the printing apparatus is often hard to be detected or defined or not being detected at all. Moreover, there were not a system or apparatus existed to inform the usage or remaining amount of the modeling material of a 3D printing apparatus simultaneously. Therefore, the printing heads need to be detached from the printing head module each time of the operations to ensure the sufficient amount of the modeling material inside thereof for usage or to detect the dispensing or remaining amount of the modeling material. The detachment processes of the current printing heads are often time consuming, manpower intensive, and costly. As a result, to some extent, the current 3-D printing process is still inconvenient and expensive in terms of maintenance and cost of the equipment operation.